


“i’ll still be here when you’re ready.”

by clickingkeyboards



Series: one hundred ways to say 'i love you' [78]
Category: Murder Most Unladylike Series - Robin Stevens
Genre: Angst, Autism, Autistic Character, Best Friends, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Relationships, M/M, meltdowns, sensory overloads
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:35:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23883133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clickingkeyboards/pseuds/clickingkeyboards
Summary: The stress of the Cambridge Murders builds up and bears down, and something has to give.Canon EraWritten for the seventy-ninth prompt in the '100 ways to say "I love you"' prompt list by p0ck3tf0x on Tumblr.
Relationships: Alexander Arcady & George Mukherjee, Alexander Arcady/George Mukherjee
Series: one hundred ways to say 'i love you' [78]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1533164
Kudos: 18





	“i’ll still be here when you’re ready.”

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WritesEveryBlueMoon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WritesEveryBlueMoon/gifts), [AwkwardSauce0602](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AwkwardSauce0602/gifts).



_This isn’t how things are supposed to look._

The change is positive: a Christmas tree decorated grandly in the corner of the living area, presents wrapped in festive paper piled up underneath the tree, and a beautiful breakfast spread on the table.

Despite Alexander’s gasps of delight, I feel myself recoiling from the change in absolute disgust. It’s _different_ and I can’t stand yet another change setting my life off-kilter. It’s such an insignificant, minuscule, _positive_ difference in my life that I don’t understand at first, can’t comprehend why such a small change has wracked my mind into a state of stress that has set my hands violently shaking.

Then I realise.

I recall the swallowed-down stress during The Bonfire Night Murder, the tension I carried with me that felt like knots in my palms, stones piled upon my shoulders, chains around my ankles. I carried that distress with me long after the culprit was discovered, aching with the pressure of the change until the smallest thing (somebody emptying my bag all over the ground and causing my most prized fountain pen from Harold to explode all over my immaculate prep work) set me off into a meltdown that felt very much like pinwheeling off the edge of a cliff. 

I don’t know what they are, what the name is for these frantic episodes when my mind drops into free fall. It feels like I am being cut loose from a climb and tumbling to the earth below, waiting for Alex to catch me before I hit the ground. Alexander calls them meltdowns while I call them burning up. There is no other way to describe the prickling sensation that burns bright under my skin, as if something is torching me from the inside out and trying to twist me into submission to something invisible. 

_Shit_.

Not _now_ . Any time but now. I can’t have a meltdown on _Christmas Day_ , not when Alex is standing beside me with a hand on my shoulder, talking about a real British Christmas at a speed that could outrun an Olympic athlete, not when I must spend an entire day pretending to care about the man that this holiday celebrates, not when I must be on guard all day for fear of violently religious beatings.

“No, no, no.”

As the words escape me, the emotions that are balled up in my chest are flung to an extreme so far out of my broken grasp that I cannot tell what they are. They are far too enormous for me to hold inside me, instead escaping my body and presenting themselves in a roiling rain cloud, one that I am watching pass overhead, waiting to be struck with lightning. If I raise my hand, will it connect to my fingertips? Will I be shocked unconscious as I spasm across the room? Or will I be alive when I am thrown into the lit fireplace and watching myself burn?

Why am I upset? Am I upset at all? Is there any feeling in my body capable of telling me the answer?

I don’t know why I’m upset and that feeds into my stress, a vicious cycle that I can’t break because it feels like I am losing my grasp on reality, the world bending into strange shapes before my eyes, let loose like a rope escaping from my grasp. If my hold on this world is a rope, I am watching the length of it whip through my fingers, burnt from friction, and allowing me to fall down, down, down. Nothing in my mind can tie together comprehensively, thoughts lost before completion as the commands my body demands begin to fail before the instructions can be carried out.

“George?” Alex says, and my eyes lazily focus on him, right in front of my face with blond hair brushed back from his forehead and hazel eyes boring into me.

“No,” I say, and I can say it confidently without the drowning stammer rising in my throat and throttling every other word I try to say. Over and over, I repeat it until Alexander firmly clamps a hand down on my shoulder.

“ _George_.”

With something between a shriek and a hiss, I jerk away from the burning contact, a lightning strike passing through clothing, which should be an insulator, and I instantly feel myself lose balance. I attempt to put my foot back to stop myself, but the command stops short somewhere in my stomach before it can reach. My arms don’t automatically fly backwards to catch me, and I fall bonelessly towards the sofa, cracking my head on the arm. It jerks my head forward with force and I end up in a ball on the ground with a hitching sob in my throat, feeling lost inside my own skin. 

“Oh, hey, George,” he says, awkward as anything as he drops to his knees beside me, voice wrought with panic. A sour stab of regret twists in my gut; _I_ made him sound like that. “You’re going to be alright. I know it’s… alarming, when stuff changes, but it’ll be okay. Can I look at your head? Please?”

I would let him, want to let him, because the cool press of his fingers against my head would ground me like an anchor, but I can’t. There’s something else about anchors, something that I cannot ignore: they conduct electricity. They tame lightning strikes and reel them in like a prize, and I don’t want to be struck down again. 

“You’re waving a red flag at a bull,” I manage to rasp out, and his chuckle rumbles low in my throat. Like lightning between us, I feel the sparks careen unrelenting into my mind at the sound. They roll around and it stings, hissing inside my head like a malignant tumor and beating strong as if my heart is up inside my head. That’s where Harold used to say that it was, after calling me too serious for a child and ruffling my hair. If my heart was in my head, the regular throbbing would make sense, and I am grasping for anything that is one shred of sensible right now. 

“I wouldn’t be opposed to it, but you do say that red isn’t your colour,” he says in a shaking voice, and I open my eyes to see him tentatively reaching towards me. The piercing way that light spikes out from the chandelier feels like an interrogation light in my eyes, and Alexander moves so that his head blocks it from my line of sight. It gives him an oddly regal halo about his person, like somebody come to save me. “Okay?”

I nod, and I feel it, the movement of my head and the changing orientation of my mind, and the press of my tongue against the roof of my mouth. “Yes.”

He presses his hand to my face, cupping my jaw, and I lean into the contact that burns like a brand. It’s hardly intoxicating, stinging in such a sharp way that makes me want to scream, but I know that it’s Alexander. Kind, caring, awkward Alexander, crouching beside me and trying to coax me back into being George Mukherjee, and less of the barely-functioning small child stuck inside a body far too big for him.

I don’t feel like a child, though. I feel like me, so unbearably like me that it hurts to acknowledge. Although I seem childish, as if I am throwing a tantrum, that could not be further from the truth. It's not for attention: I am not begging for anything other than for it to _stop_.

“Here. Take my hand.”

I fumble for it and grip on tight. “Are you alright?”

I shake my head and it makes me dizzy. “No. No. No. No. No.”

“Hey, hey, it’s okay, you don’t have to be,” he says, but the hysterical feeling takes hold. I have no idea what compels it, nothing other than the insane need to talk and talk, to shout until I’m hoarse. All I want to do is _speak_.

“No. No. No. No. No.” All I can do is repeat it over and over, and there’s an insane assurance in what I’m doing, the way that the words escape my lips with a perfectly clipped enunciation only marred by tears.

_I can’t even refuse right._

“Take your time,” he says, and his voice is impossibly soft and caring, and he is holding my hand soft and delicate but firm, contrasting my iron grip. “I’ll still be here when you’re ready.”

My grip on Alexander’s hand is tight but I can’t let go, don’t want to. He’s an anchor, pulling me down to earth, and damn it if I can feel the lightning roiling up and down my spine. Underneath one of my nails — I couldn’t tell which — I feel skin break and gasp, wrench my hand out of his grip. “I’m sorry, Alex.”

Although I still feel the manic need to scream, to let go, Alexander holds on tight. I’m slumped against the sofa, utterly boneless, neither of us speaking and both of us breathing hard. Someone sobs. It could be either of us.

“Let me look at your head, George. Please.”

I oblige, shaking. I drew blood. I broke Alex’s skin.

_How could I?_

Gently, he tips my head forward and his hands touch the back, threading through my hair and pushing it apart with delicate fingers. “You should be okay. We’ll go to a doctor tomorrow, get Harold to take us.”

He draws his hand back and I see my damage in a sliver of red on the outside of his wrist. There’s the tiniest fleck of blood under the nail of my index finger. 

_I did that._

“It’s alright.”

“I know.” Logically, I do. These meltdowns, burn-ups, they’re far from my fault. I lose control and that is what is terrifying about them. What happens during them is out of my conscious control to a certain extent. Still, logic is not falling into my hands as it usually does, and that is frightening.

“Come on. Take my hand.”

I do, gently, and he pulls me to my feet. I steady myself against his shoulder, sit down on the sofa. “Thank you.”

The world is clearer with every blink, and each piece of input is less unbearable. “Are you alright?”

“Why did this—” I wave a hand at the pretty set-up in the living room. “—make me… burn up?”

“Think. You’re the genius.” He half-laughs and half-smiles, half-reaches for me with half-conviction and a half-idea of what he’s going to do. He half-offers me coffee with a half-gesture towards a half-full coffee pot. We’ll be dealing in halves, quarters, not quite wholes for the entire day, because burn-ups splinter up what is whole. Lighting strikes and lightning breaks and it takes hours to mould it back to its original shape. If I were less logical, I would fear that one day, the soldering will not take.

“Everything’s built up over the last few days,” I realise. “The change is what broke it.”

“The straw that broke the camel’s back.”

“Stop using idioms,” I scold as he pours us two mugs, offering one out to me. “We’re supposed to be out of school.”

“And here we are at another,” he teases, taking a sip and gasping, pulling a face. “Good lord, it’s hot.”

“That is how coffee tends to work, Alex.”

He smiles and says, “Ah, there you are.”

“You aren’t supposed to like it when I’m a twat.” I blow on the coffee and sip it, and it’s the perfect temperature. “You’re sensitive, this isn’t scalding at all.”

“You aren’t being a prick; you’re being a twat. Remember that lesson you gave me on the semantics of British slang?” His grin is infuriating, and I can’t help but be relieved that I’m seeing it.

“Don’t annoy a man with a weapon, Alex.”

“What weapon would that be?”

I brandish the mug at him. “Hot coffee.”

To mirror me, he raises his mug.

“Alex, that’s for wine glasses,” I tell him with a roll of my eyes.

“Fuck how it’s supposed to be done, right?” When we clink our mugs together, a spark of lightning passes between them. It’s one last strike, an air of finality that shocks the clouds into dissipating into no more than the slight steam rolling out of each of our mugs. 

A perfect strike of lighting. 

Only this time, it’s good. 


End file.
